Out of Pod Experience

First off, this post isn't a reply to a specific person. Consider it my 2 cent in the discussion of whether Star Citizen is technically doable or not.


It's ok to not like Star Citizen for whatever reason you can find, but saying that it is outright technically impossible is BS imo.

I'm not in any way competent to say if this or that feature is impossible to realize ... and neither are you. But what I can do, is analyze what has been historically deemed impossible in videogames and how that might indicate if a technical barrier can be overcome.

In the 1980's developers learned to overcome the shortcomings of the 8-bit computers. On the Commodore 64, which was limited to 8 sprites (moveable objects), they used raster interupts to create the illusion of more sprites. They drew 8 sprites for split seconds, then drew them at another place for split seconds. The eye would see 16 sprites. If that wasn't enough, the character set of the computer (letters, numbers, symbols) was altered to become either part of the level or moveable objects like bullets, grenades ...

Another 80's game crammed an entire universe into a very small amount of memory. I'm talking of Elite and the first prominent use of procedural generation in a videogame.

In 1993 (I think) Doom was a real mindblowing experience. For the first time an FPS game was not just a flat corridor with flat lighting. Things further away were rendered darker that things up close. For the first time you could walk over stairs or take a lift ... and head bobbing was a new concept, to a point that it made you feel sick the ver first time. The funny thing is that we already knew real 3D worlds from racing games (4D Stunts, Hard Driving ...), the thing is that those games used vector graphics. Vector graphics or polygons were easy to draw but were no more that simple shapes with not much detail. Texture mapping was known, but it was to slow to be used in large area games. Doom on the other hand had you enclosed in a box, the skybox. Only the level got texture mapping, all the objects in the game where 2D bitmaps that gave an illusion of being 3D.

Then came Novalogic's Comanche: Maximum Overkill. Most flight simulators had flat terrain with a pyramid for a mountain and a rectangle for a building. Comanche had the most stunning colourfull and detailled terrain using it's voxel engine. Another thing was different (not new, mind you). In Comanche you never hit an invisible wall that would limit your movement. Until then it seemed that a complex scenery had to be enclosed in a box. The developer got around that constraint by simply making the player transition immidiatly to the opposite side of the map. This way the player never left the map and yet could fly in a straignt line for hours.

I believe it was Tribes that first combined infantry and airborne units in a truly huge environment. Before that Quake was the measure of FPS games and while Quake had some huge outdoor maps, Tribes had much bigger maps.

The next big step was Half-Life's way of connecting individual maps. For the first time you would not have the impression of playing individual maps, because the transition was quick and unintrusive.

By 2004 Novalogic had released Joint-Ops: Typhoon Rising. It featured 150 player multi-player mode at a time when 32 players was a standard. Another thing that distinguished this game from Battlefield 2 was that there was no invisible or visible barrier that would limit your movement. You could hop into a helicopter and fly in any direction always increasing the distance between you and your starting point. While the terrain would repeat itself, you would not be put on the opposite side of the map as had been the case in Novalogic's Comanche:MO.

150 Players on a single map was of course nothing new in games, only in fast paced FPS games. MMOs didn't have the same technical constraints regarding speed and accuracy. If you don't have to model the flight path of each bullet accurately, you can have more players on the same map. Generally MMOs would have a little more than 2000 Players per server. You would always log on to the same server. Game companies would run a couple of server farms all over the world, so that there would be enough servers close to their customers. Anything different didn't make sense.

Along came CCP and instead of running one instance of their MMO on each server for a limited amount of players per server, they opened a new view of what massive multiplayer really meant. Instead of paying a fee to be manually moved from one server to another server you just warp to a gate and jump into the next system (which may or may not be on different server). Mindblowing. There's not 2000 players around you, but tens of thousands and they are from all over the world ... not just your region. It's not that this has never existed before, but for the first time it existed in a full 3D environment with real-time interaction, 23 hours a day.

For those who have played around 2006 and before, you may remember how Jita was chock full with less than 800 players in system. You may remember how fleet battles with 400 member resulted in node crashes. You may remember the efforts by CCP to reduce lag, increase server speed with new hardware (rememeber the first blog about the RAMSAN servers ?)

So yeah ... if you think something is impossible, it may be so. Unless you have the technical expertise to prove your point, you may want to keep on the cautious side. Let's see what the future brings.

hah I didn't even realize they put that in. space tutorial.
I think 4yrs ago it looks. Nota EVE killer